Riddler walked into the production area one morning with two new people trailing behind. They were introduced as new production team members. I was unaware that we were hiring anyone and had never seen anything about these people before. That includes: resume, portfolio, background, etc. Nothing.

Unsurprisingly, neither of them had experience (they were right out of school), and had never used any of the key applications needed by everyone in the production team.

Meaning, these were complete newbies that I was now tasked with training while also attempting to finish a crazy impending deadline simultaneously.

So how did they work out? Let’s summarize…

Captain Sleepy

  • On multiple times, this dedicated worker was found sitting at his desk with headphones on, facing the monitor, eyes closed, snoring and fully asleep.
  • He remains the only person to ever call in to say he wouldn’t be coming in to work because his eyes were watering and he couldn’t find a parking spot.
  • Captain Sleepy also maintains the phone utilization award. He was on 2 office phones at the same time, while also on his cell phone, and then received a third call on the office phone thereby plugging all office lines at once. Of course all of these were personal calls.

Watchtower

  • Watchtower was one of the first recipients of the ‘not on my team’ designation. Meaning, he had proven so incompetent that production team members would fight to not have this individual on their team. He was generally not capable of doing anything right the first time, or second, or third…
  • Was known for his obsessive collection of autographed celebrity photos, and for arriving every morning sweating profusely and reeking of cigarettes.
  • Spent 8 months developing a website login page, unsuccessfully. (To his credit, he informed Riddler he couldn’t do it but Riddler ignored him.)
  • Riddler was decisive as usual and, after half a year of Watchtower screwing up, decided to ‘let him go’. Except he was ‘back part-time’ the following week continuing to fail for another 6 months or so.
  • We all expected Watchtower to snap one day and arrive at work with a rifle.